


Because It Was Real

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Present Tense, Thranduil Not Being An Asshole, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 00:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3360500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thranduil thinks much and says little, because very little he could say would help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because It Was Real

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what this is, alright, I just got hit a little hard by feelings.

It isn’t the size of dwarves that makes them small. They are that, anyway, stout and unattractive and hairy and strange; Thranduil knows this, but more than that he disdains them, they make him uncomfortable. Every creature feels small, when it hasn’t known millennia to fall away like water over rock the way he has. It does not do to love mortal things, for they will ever perish and fall into ruin. That is the way of the world.

There are many kinds of love, of course, some less dangerous than others. The love of beauty, the love of life and light and song. These things will never leave. Though each plant and tree will fade individually, Greenwood the Great has endured long and will continue to do so. The starlight so beloved by his people will never fall away. Their ballads, ancient and solemn, will carry on long after his people have left the shores of this world.

But to love a creature that will die, to love them truly, in either friendship or romance, that is to invite ruin. This is a lesson Thranduil has long attempted to impart on the impetuous youth of his forest. To allow oneself to love a mortal being is impractical, foolish beyond measure, when even their own timeless people can be stolen away at the point of a blade. He knows that pain, sharp and full and endless. The lifeblood of his beloved, spilled on the barren rock of Gundabad far from his kingly reach and with no sun-haired, slender-limbed body to entomb. A chasm that cannot be overcome, only endured. A nameless wrenching, that he cannot bear to think of her or to stop thinking of her, that he cannot even speak her name. There is not even an empty plot marked with a willow for his son to sit and mourn, and Thranduil knows this is cruel. But he cannot bring himself, has not the energy to even lift a hand and order it done, this action which would ease some of the pain in Legolas’ pool-blue gaze.

Thranduil – for all his age and authority and supposed wisdom – cannot summon the power to ease the hurts of others, but he is not a cruel king.

He feels pity, then, for Tauriel. Her auburn hair is pooled on the stone of Ravenhill and she looks much worse for wear. Blood, long-dried and cracking now, has streaked down from a cut above her eye and followed the curve of her cheekbone. She looks up at his approach and he sees that look of unbridled disbelief, despair, on her face and finds that all his cautioning has come too late. That she has already handed over the starlight in her eyes to a being that would inevitably take it with him into the Halls of Mandos.

And so he has.

She looks to him, her king, her protector, to pull the cup of suffering from her pale and trembling lips. But even he is incapable of easing her heart.

It is, quite simply, too late.

“If this is love, I do not want it,” she tells him, as if love is a gift – a curse – that can be given back.

Her words are childlike, she does not understand her own pain because she had not the foresight to expect it. Today, tomorrow, a hundred years hence, he had told her. The dwarf would take what Tauriel had given him, and not return it. Not because of any cruelty of his own, but because he was mortal and someday he would die. Even were he to live four centuries, the legendary age of Durin, called Deathless by his kin, those four centuries were nothing in the life of an elf.

All Thranduil’s age and experience gives him for comfort is the knowledge that though she does not want to, Tauriel will endure. Her purpose is to protect others, to fight darkness and evil wherever she finds it, and there is much evil yet in their world. Dol Guldur may be emptied, but the Greenwood’s illness lingers like a cloud across the moon. Though she does not want to hear it, he tells her that her place in his kingdom is returned to her; both as a captain and as his ward. He will not deny her the trees for which she was named, the forest which has sheltered her all her life. When she is ready, there is, as there has ever been, a place for her.

This moment though, she can have. A small prick of light – a star, memory – aching with promises that could never have been kept. Thranduil does not envy her the pain that assaults her; is it worse to kiss your love first after they have passed, or to lose them at the height of your happiness, to have to share the burden of that loss with a child? That he does not know, and cannot. Nor does he wish to quantify their pain.

Thranduil leaves her there, to keep vigil over the body of her dark-haired dwarf prince until his people come to hide him away under metal and stone, deep in the mountain, far from starlight where she cannot follow.

Her sobs must reach even the ears of the Valar, he is sure, and if Aulë is at all moved by her garbled, broken Sindarin pleas, he will grant the dwarf a crown made of diamonds and a place of plenty with all his kin in the Halls that are beyond her reach.


End file.
